Another expensive government subsidized solar scam down the drain. Warren Buffett owns Nevada’s state utility and was Crescent Dunes’ only customer. Even James Hansen favors nuclear energy over “renewables”-American Thinker, Norman Rogers

The scalable forms of renewable energy are wind and solar. Hydro is severely limited by most state laws that define renewable energy–not because hydro is not renewable, but because it is not politically correct. Dams are not politically acceptable to the kayakers and big thinkers at the Sierra Club. Nevada is wind poor but sunshine rich. So for Nevada, solar is the only route to energy nirvana.

Crescent Dunes was a serious project designed to attack the great weakness of solar electricity. Sunshine is strongest in the middle of the day, but demand for electricity peaks at the end of the day and in the early evening. This is especially true during the Las Vegas summer, when air-conditioners are running full blast as temperatures soar well past 100 degrees in the late afternoon.

The Crescent Dunes project stores energy in the form of molten salts. During the day, sunshine is concentrated by motorized mirrors aiming beams of sunlight at a central tower, where the liquid salts are heated to a high temperature. The hot salts are stored in a large tank. When power is need in the early evening, heat is taken from the tank to make steamand drive a turbine-generator to make electricity. Crescent Dunes was plagued by leaks in the salt tank, forcing it to close for months at a time.By contract, the electricity was sold to NV Energy for $135 per megawatt-hour, or about six times as much as it would cost to generate the same amount of electricity in existing natural gas plants.